Cry of the Firebird

by T. M. Clark

  ‘Jail does not scare me,’ Ulwazi said.

  ‘Where he will put you should. If you even get there. You need to tell me who did this so that I can close the door, and they can never speak of what you did.’

  ‘You do not need to “clean up” after me,’ Ulwazi said.

  ‘Actually, I do. You need me now more than you ever did before. Your son is gone. Your muscle. Your grandson Zenzele is already dying of the thinnings disease. Your other grandson listens to no one, and he is on a collision course for a bullet in his brain the way things are going. He runs around doing what he wants to like an American gangster living in Johannesburg. Neither of your grandchildren can help you with this. What will the taxi drivers do when they find that it was you who started it? That it was a hit on the policewoman and not a territory dispute, because that is probably the information you told them, wasn’t it? When the retaliations began immediately after that, the wars started once more. Those are real men dying out there, in a dispute created from false information fed to them by you. You lied to the Taxi Association members; they will come after you.’

  Ulwazi slowly nodded. ‘They will not dare touch me. They all know better.’

  ‘Once maybe, not anymore. Now they see you as old and weak. A grandmother who has no discipline for her grandchildren. This time you killed a cop, and you manipulated the taxi drivers to begin a war again without them having gained anything from it. The cops will hunt you down. There will be no business if the information queen herself is shot and killed. I do not want to walk away from you; this business brings me good money, and perhaps soon it can bring me even more because I will help you watch over your business until your great-grandchildren can take over. So, let me make sure that it continues to bring both of us good money. I need names. Ulwazi, who did you pay to shoot Detective Hatch?’

  CHAPTER

  36

  Piet drummed his fingers on his desk.

  ‘One plus one does not equal five, no matter what the reality,’ he said, looking at the pictures of the crime scene in front of him.

  His best friend. Natalie.

  It was hard to see the pictures, knowing that she was once so vibrant and active; now to anyone looking at the crime scene, she was a chalk cross and a dried blood pool on the cold concrete of the pavement. He touched the photograph where she had laid before the paramedics had resuscitated her the first time.

  It hadn’t been enough. She had died a week later anyway.

  The twelfth of December was now burned into his memory as a day to remember the fallen.

  If only he had been closer.

  He wished there was a way to turn back the clock and change that day; he would give everything to have been there to prevent her death. Breanna had gone to live with her grandparents, and she had not sent Piet a single picture of a puppy since her mother’s death. He missed the texts from his goddaughter. He needed to text her, check on her, but it hurt his heart.

  There was more to the taxi incident, and he knew better than to look at it at face value.

  ‘Detective Kleinman?’ a young voice said next to him.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m Constable Makoni Namane. Acting Chief Chetty told me to come find you—I’m your new partner.’

  Piet ground his teeth. No one in the police force was supposed to be irreplaceable, that was the nature of the work. But Chetty knew that he and Natalie had been friends, too, and he had hoped for more time alone. He had chosen not to take grievance leave on purpose; he would mourn his friend once he’d caught her killer. That was what he could do for her.

  Get her justice.

  He would not allow her to be yet another unsolved case in the growing pile of murders happening in South Africa.

  ‘I have removed all of Nat—Detective Hatch’s personal effects; the space is free.’

  ‘I heard you had a special, long friendship, and that’s exceptional. I wish I could have known her,’ Constable Makoni Namane said.

  Piet watched his new partner, who was putting his backpack on Natalie’s desk. The skinny black man was perhaps in his early twenties, and his uniform hung on him from shoulders that had yet to fill out. His chest needed time to broaden. His hair was shaved close to his head, in the fashion of one who only recently got out of the police college. The poor laaitie had no idea what he was stepping into. Piet stood up and extended his hand. ‘Good to have you on board. I guess it’s a new year, new beginnings to us, then.’

  They shook hands.

  ‘Chetty said that you’re working on a complicated case. He said that you would bring me up to speed. He also said that I had drawn the short straw being your partner. What does he mean?’

  ‘Acting Chief Chetty is an idiot, and will be out the door within a month; then you will meet a real chief. Come,’ Piet said. ‘We can go into one of the meeting rooms, and I can get you up to speed on what’s been happening. You are starting in the middle of a major investigation. Tell me, Makoni, are you good with computers?’

  ‘Yes,’ Makoni said.

  ‘Good. I hate the things. We should get on well.’ Piet picked up the files he had been looking at and walked towards the room with the big boardroom table in the middle. ‘You coming?’

  Makoni rushed to the room as if there was a fire behind him.

  Piet closed the door, put the files on the table and started to bring Makoni up to speed.

  About three hours later, Makoni said, ‘In school, no one picked me for their sports team because I was too uncoordinated. But in varsity, people always wanted to be my partner, because they say I have keen analytical skills and can see things that others miss. In the police college it changed. People recognised that while I was skinny, I was also very fit. Those same people noticed that I could analyse things as a big picture, and still pick out the threads that held the ideas together.’

  ‘Yes, so? As my partner I expect you to have an opinion and to express it. It is not a partnership unless both of us work together. What do you see?’

  ‘A big question on motivation.’

  ‘What?’ Piet asked.

  ‘I understand the hijackings, the weapons, the link to organised crime. What I don’t get is how did the information fall into the hands of Kagiso and his mother, Ulwazi Dubazane, for them to have a hit on the doctors? And if the medical-aid-fraud assessor is related—as the same MO suggests—how did Kagiso Dubazane know where to find Dr Winters that day?’

  Piet nodded. ‘Both good questions—I don’t have an answer to either. We’ve been trying to figure it out.’

  Makoni nodded.

  ‘Here is another one for you. Look at the second part and the taxis’ shootout photographs. Look at where Detective Hatch was shot, and where Khanyi took four bullets in his butt protecting Lily. What do you see?’

  Makoni looked at the pictures. He then rearranged them on the table. ‘Do you have any string?’

  ‘Should be some in the drawer over there,’ Piet said.

  Makoni grabbed it and then began laying the blue string from the pictures back to where the taxis should have been. Then he put the pictures of where the shopping party were shot. And he laid the string from there, to the taxis.

  ‘I am simply a constable and have only been out of the academy for a few months, but I have always loved forensic science. This wasn’t a taxi war. This was an execution. No bystanders were injured, and both taxis got away with no casualties from either of them at the scene. They were likely not shooting at each other, but because there were no vehicles recovered, we can’t be certain. The shells ejected out of open windows indicate multiple shots. You would expect some blood. Something. All the taxi attacks after this one, we have had bodies?’

  ‘Every single one here in Kimberley was a bloodbath, drivers and passengers caught in the carnage. This incident is the anomaly. What else do you see?’ Piet asked.

  ‘One or two people have shot at a ninety-degree angle to where the other taxi should have been. Not at the taxis, but dire
ctly at the people shopping. They were either trying to get to the doctor, or Detective Hatch was the intended target all along.’

  ‘Why do you think Detective Hatch was the target?’

  ‘Organised crime. The file on your original attempted hijack on Dr Lily Winters. Detective Hatch was named as the policewoman who fatally shot Kagiso Dubazane. I would put my money on this being a revenge killing, made to look like a taxi war by the Dubazane organisation.’

  Piet nodded his head. He had landed with a smart partner, young but intelligent, and not afraid to speak his mind either. ‘I also arrived at that. It is good to get confirmation from a fresh set of eyes. Here is the picture I took, doing exactly the same as you with string earlier today.’ He showed his mobile phone, and the strings were multicoloured. ‘We have a cop-killing gang on our hands.’

  CHAPTER

  37

  Lily sat at her desk. After her six weeks away on crutches to allow her leg to heal, she had been looking forward to getting back to work again. The shot had gone straight through her thigh and hadn’t done much damage, but the shock of the incident had triggered nightmares again, as had happened after she left Zam Zam.

  Now she knew she would have to face what was coming head on. There was no running from it.

  Zam Zam had been life-threatening. She and Quintin had driven different vehicles out of there, carrying many of the nurses and doctors with them. They had fled as fast as they could from the rebels who had sacked the place behind them and killed many of the refugees, then tortured and raped many more. They had not got away unscathed, but they had been able to get away.

  Those left behind had had nowhere to go to.

  Ian’s opinions on the situation had been taken over hers, because she was a female. Now she knew why he’d had such determination and been so adamant the drop of the drugs the next day would happen. It burned her stomach to think that he had been so selfish on one hand, and yet, on the other, so giving, even if it was a risky move that he’d made for the refugees. She wished that he had trusted her enough to confide in her then, but the likelihood of her going along with his hairbrained scheme then was exactly nil.

  She and Quintin were simply too law-abiding to get involved with anything like what Ian had been up to. And for that she was thankful.

  She took a deep breath.

  ‘Lily, you survived that. Quintin survived. Together you can do this,’ she said quietly to herself. But the memories kept tumbling in like a movie that wouldn’t end.

  Back then, she didn’t know Ian had been paying the rebels, who had turned on him anyway. Obviously, there was no honesty or integrity among thieves and rebels, of any sort.

  WHO had supported his decision to delay the evacuation, even saying that Lily was overreacting when she had voiced her opinion about the delay. To give Ian credit where it was due, the drugs did arrive. A huge bomber airdropped the expected aid package. But the rebels followed the bombers and drove right into the heart of Zam Zam. And Lily and Quintin had had to flee and return to the safety of Australia, leaving the whole nightmare situation behind.

  It was the first time as aid workers that they had abandoned a refugee camp. But that was not possible this time. There was no leaving. This had become personal. She would never outrun it.

  She looked again at the comprehensive report from her MRI that she had been given. But she didn’t need to. The images were burned onto her brain already. She would never forget it. Well ironically, she supposed she would.

  She gave a stilted laugh.

  While her initial MRI had been done for a suspected concussion, the new comparison MRI was only a few weeks old. It was taken in the hospital after the attack at the shopping centre that had killed Natalie. Robert Mayer had called her into his office to deliver the results and discuss options with her, but even now she could scarcely remember anything he’d said, even though it was only an hour ago.

  These images showed much more than ever expected. It wasn’t good.

  She walked over to the light box on the wall and clipped up her old plates, and one of the newer plates next to it. There it was—no brain swelling associated with a concussion in the second plate. Instead, clear as day in the comparison was the loss of brain mass associated with Alzheimer’s disease, the shrinking hippocampus. A substantial decline in size, enough that she could see it, even without the helpful computerised ruler laid across it, giving her the accurate measurements.

  She could not catch a break since coming to South Africa. She was a doctor, how had she not picked up the symptoms in herself?

  Early-onset Alzheimer’s.

  Her fingers were shaking badly as she ran them through her hair, and she stumbled back to her chair. Taking a deep breath, she googled ‘Ten signs of Alzheimer’s’. Lily read it not because she needed to, but because she wanted to double-check. She printed the pages, waiting as they churned out one by one. Lifting the papers, she stacked them into a neat pile, then picked up a pen. She began to put dates and tried to remember when she’d first shown the symptoms. She knew she was going to have to see somebody else and explore further. Her usual doctor was back in Australia.

  As a doctor, when a patient came to her, she’d normally recommend that the family get involved right away and she would check the situation between the patient and the family so she could assess exactly what it was and if the patient would need other support. She didn’t want to upset Quintin, but she knew that she needed his hand to hold through the tests that were going to follow.

  She didn’t want to face this alone.

  Robert Mayer had suggested she contact a specialist, Mr Neel Coetzee, in Johannesburg. Lily looked at Neel’s number and swallowed hard. She’d studied for years to be a doctor to be able to diagnose diseases such as this in patients and help, yet she’d never dreamed that she’d be diagnosed herself, at just over fifty, with early-onset Alzheimer’s. Lily took a deep breath and let it out slowly before she reached for the phone and called the doctor’s rooms.

  After speaking with the specialist and making an appointment for Friday, she put down the phone. They’d discussed how he’d do a CT and PET scan—where they’d inject a low-level radioactive tracer into her blood in the hope it would reveal any peculiar features in the brain, like areas of low metabolism which would help him diagnose Alzheimer’s or another type of dementia. And she’d agreed to courier the MRI and blood works she’d already had done to him.

  Lily texted Quintin. You at home? Got comprehensive results from MRI and we need to talk.

  Almost immediately she got a reply. Sounds serious. I’m free NOW. Your clinic or home?

  Home. I’m on my way.

  I’m in my studio, as always. xoxo♥

  This was one appointment she couldn’t do alone—she didn’t feel that she had the right to do it alone either. Having a patient diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s led to hard decisions for both the doctor and the patient. Being confronted with knowing that your loved one was about to be lost to you, was something many people didn’t give enough thought to. She didn’t want to do that to Quintin. He’d always been there—right next to her. He’d questioned some of her symptoms long before she’d even noticed them, and found ways to work around them, without ever making her feel inadequate.

  As sick as she felt at the news, she had to share it with him. She knew that somehow, they’d handle it together.

  * * *

  The afternoon sun was warming the dining room, coming through the net curtains and making strange shadows across the glossy table. Sitting at the head of the dining-room table was Lily, and in the chair to her left, Quintin. Telling him the news, and seeing the love of her life having to process that ultimately she was terminal, was heartbreaking.

  ‘You sure you want to do this here and not go home to Australia?’ Quintin asked. ‘We have the best specialists back home.’

  ‘They have great specialists here, too. Besides, I can’t leave. We’re about to start closing in on the drug c
ompany, and I need to be here for it.’

  ‘I know. I understand. But it was worth a try.’

  She lifted her hand and cupped his chin. ‘I love you.’

  Quintin kissed her. ‘Love you too. And you’re not going to be doing this by yourself. We haven’t done things that way in all the years we’ve been married, so we’re not about to start now.’

  * * *

  Quintin held her hand as they walked into her appointment. Mr Neel Coetzee gestured for her to sit down and then he sat behind the desk. The office was light, modern—nothing like hers. It had plush deep-blue carpets, a set of leather chairs to one side and a huge glass desk that dominated the other side of the room. His Apple computer stood proudly on his desk, and as she looked around, the only personal item she could see was an old leather donkey sitting on its own shelf, away from all the books.

  ‘Good to meet you,’ he said.

  Lily held her breath. Even facing the evidence of her MRI, she still held out hope that it could be something else. Something that she and the other doctors hadn’t thought of.

  ‘Lily, I’ve reviewed your results, along with your blood works, and they’ve ruled out a few other potential causes for your problems. Your thyroid is fine, and you have no vitamin deficiencies, although you could do with some iron tablets. We need to do one or two more tests, then I can give you my diagnosis.’

  Lily nodded and squeezed Quintin’s hand.

  ‘Quintin,’ he said, ‘have you noticed if Lily forgets to do anything with her personal hygiene?’

  Quintin shook his head. ‘Lily wears a uniform to work, so it’s a little hard to tell if it’s the same one on consecutive days. But Bessie, our maid, would’ve commented on not having anything to wash. Lily’s still looking after herself—she showers, washes her hair, brushes her teeth.’